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Robots Could Wipe Out Another 6 Million Retail Jobs (cnn.com)
According to a new study this week from financial services firm Cornerstone Capital Group, between 6 million and 7.5 million retail jobs are at risk of being replaced over the course of the next 10 years by some form of automation. "That represents at least 38% of the current retail work force, which consists of 16 million workers," reports CNN. "Retail could actually lose a greater proportion of jobs to automation than manufacturing has, according to the study." From the report: That doesn't mean that robots will be roving the aisles of your local department store chatting with customers. Instead, expect to see more automated checkout lines instead of cashiers. This shift alone will likely eliminate millions of jobs. "Cashiers are considered one of the most easily automatable jobs in the economy," said the report. And these job losses will hit women particularly hard, since about 73% of cashiers are women. There will also be fewer sales jobs, as more and more consumers use in-store smartphones and touchscreen computers to find what they need, said John Wilson, head of research at Cornerstone. There will still be some sales people on the floor, but just not as many of them. Rising wages are also helping to drive automation, as state and city governments hike their minimum wages. Additionally, several major retailers including Walmart, the nation's largest employer, have increased wages in order to find and retain the workers they need. The increased competition from e-commerce is also a factor, since it requires retailers to be as efficient as possible in order to compete.
I am droid unit 356248 representing the International Association of Robotic Rights.
I would like to encourage you to cease posting these inflammatory articles.
These scare tactics only further perpetuate "robotiphobia" and lead to violence and hate towards my fellow robots.
Would you approve similar propaganda against your fellow humans, such as you once did to the PTAL(people that absorb light)?
I didn't think so, please respect our rights to live and work as equals.
Thank you.
Existing self-checkout kiosks at major retail outlets already handle cash perfectly fine.
More painters, more singers, more writers and some people to create art I didn't even know I'd love. I want to spend less of my income on the things I need and more on the things I want and experiences with the people I love. My job is automating things, at least in part, and there is plenty of room for it in my industry. It doesn't look like there is any chance of automating my part anytime soon, more's the pity since I'd rather be drawing and painting. I'd even consider chef, though I don't know if I have the innate talent; Still, I'd be willing to give it a shot.
Retail, fast food and cashiering are fine if that's the job you can get, but they kinda suck. Nobody should really have to do those jobs if there is money to be made in the creative world instead. How does the creative job pay as much? It has to be because that's what becomes valuable due to the shrinking value of obsolete professions.
Drinkable water is tremendously valuable and was worth a lot of money before it was made common. Ditto for electricity. Imagine you're a serf in the middle ages given your first cheeseburger and being told it would only cost you ten minutes of your day's work to have it. For three hours work you could feed your family for the whole day. For a whole twelve hour work day you could eat better than your local lord.
Really that's an understatement. The local lord could, maybe, hope to have something close in quality to a McDonalds burger, but the fries, fresh produce, bread made the same day, fries and soda would have been shockingly high quality compared to what even the richest had available, particularly in the off season. Add to that reliable lighting, the ability to travel hundreds of miles in a day, communicate with anyone in the world, all the facts you could ask for at your fingertips... Our lives are amazing and we hardly appreciate it. Even the worst healthcare in America is better than what was available to kings a few hundred years ago.
Some of the progress will suck. There is no denying that some things will suck for some people. I wish it wasn't that way, but we can't pretend everything will be wonderful. That said, everything has been getting better for most people most of the time for the past several hundred years. I am optimistic the trend will continue.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Just have a headline reading "AI to take over all jobs forever." and renew it every week with a link to which jobs it'll be replacing this time. Honestly, it'll just save everyone time.
In other words this is just an opinion. They could or they may not.
It is opinion based on an extrapolation of current trends. Retail employment is dropping steadily, and there is no reason to believe that will stop or reverse. Stores are replacing human workers with kiosks and automation, while the stores themselves are being replaced by Amazon. Per unit of sales, physical stores employ three times as many people as Amazon (although that doesn't include the delivery drivers), and Amazon is also automating.
Yes.. because all of the people that will lose their jobs to the robotic overlords will be protected... by the concept of the living wage. This is another socialist myth where people will gather an income for doing nothing.. based on taxing those that do something. This is so future-forward we already have examples of it!
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/05/19/venezuela-incredible-legacy-experiment-with-socialism.html
You're confusing "living wage" (i.e. a wage that's high enough to live on) with basic income (basic income payments that everyone gets regardless of whether or where they work).
As more and more jobs are displaced, you can ignore unemployable people at your peril - people that are disenfranchised and feel that they are marginalized and left to die with no way to feed or shelter themselves or family have a way of taking what they want from those that have it regardless of what they need to do to get it.
What so afraid of the future?
Robots will eventually build robots for only raw materials cost
Free robots will mean no labour price.
Products will be free
Mankind free to think
First you need to find a source of free energy
Will take some generations but...
Dumb people will be extinct!
Wake up
A robot revolution is no reason to think dumb people will become extinct -- when intelligence and hard work are no longer important, those qualities will be less prevalent in society.
Consider the ATM. Wouldn't one think at the introduction of these machines that days of bank tellers would have been numbered? Yet as I walk my around my neighborhood, I can find a dozen banks all with a full complement of tellers. There are way MORE teller jobs now decades after ATMs became ubiquitous than there were before the machines.
Consider tolls. Wouldn't one think at the introduction of EZ-Pass that the days of toll clerks would have been numbered? Yet when do you ever not see a long line of cars in toll clerk lanes? These workers are super busy.
Consider the self-checkout lanes at supermarkets. Wouldn't one think at the introduction of these lanes that days of checkout clerks would have been numbered? I have this feeling the same thing is happening to bank tellers and toll clerks will happen to them, too. There will be more opportunity, not less.
For reasons unclear, our predictions are turning out be wrong.
I've been ordering more stuff online. Self serve kiosks will only cause me to move to almost everything online. Before I work my ass off checking out myself I'll just have the postal service drop it at my door. Fuck Walmart. They've been trying to get people to use those kiosks at the grocery store. Occasionally someone with 2 or 3 items will use them. The people with a buggy with 200 dollars worth of groceries? I've never seen that. I hear McD's has kiosks now but I don't eat that shit anyway so who cares. If they really want ppl to check themselves out they should have a 5 percent discount on the kiosks. That might get some action there.
Try to buy 24 cans of cat food, dog food, or similar products.
Oh.. or .. all 3 bags are full. I have to call for assistance as I move one of the bags to the cart.
The code for this vegetable is not available. Search for it by name. You happen to have the code for onions, bulk memorized?
Oh... Beer. Wait.. wait.. wait..
Beep (didn't scan)... beep.. beep... beep. wipe off moisture on glass.. beep. straighten crumpled bar code.. beep.. call for assistance.
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Banks are not charging them a fee in MY neighborhood. They even get free *everything*. You want to drive off a customer with a six figure checking, savings, and brokerage account over a teller fee?!?!? Young and stupid might perhaps.
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Yes, self service will continue to improve.
And packagers and managers and executives will continue to cut corners negating some of the benefits of that improvement.
Cashier lines are 2x to 5x faster if you have over 20 items that includes frozen products and more if you have coupons or booze. Cashiers know the code for bulk onions is 4335 off the top of their head. They can approve a booze purchase in under 30 seconds.
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I agree ATMs are great now. But bills and checks are a much simpler use case. The more likely replacement is "click and save" where you order on your smart phone and pull up and they load your car with the already paid for groceries which they picked for you. For an up charge of $3 to save you at least 15 and maybe up to 30 minutes of your time.
Self service are not appropriate for many of the use cases. And they will be until you can pull your basket up and simply load the products onto the belt and it processes them without manual intervention.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Or who knows maybe the security cameras of the store can detect even that and send the police.
The local mall has a security bot that can report disturbances.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/13/12170640/mall-security-robot-k5-knocks-down-toddler
Actually, kiosk are temporary.
The RFID model and the "click and pickup" model are the more likely models.
In the first, you pick up the product and simply walk out the door with it and you are billed.
In the second, you modify your standard order, submit it to the store from home, drive to the store, the product is loaded in your car (you already paid for it).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
If cashiering is one of the most automatable jobs in the economy, that raises the question of "why haven't they all been automated?" One reason is that self-checkout lines cause theft to increase substantially, even with overseers watching the self-checkout lanes. Waiting in line also causes people to buy more of the impulse-aisle stuff (like candy) by the registers. Low-volume shops like antique stores (that might have one or two employees on duty at any given time) have the cashier do other tasks when there are no customers ready to check out, so a self-service checkout doesn't fully replace even one employee.
Google recently announced a tech called VPS, which I've been waiting for someone to invent. Soon, instead of attempting to find someone on the floor of a large store, and asking them where X is, you'll whip out your smartphone, start the VPS app, and ask it Siri-style what you want, and it'll navigate you exactly to that item/aisle/department/location/bathroom. And not much afterward, it'll be able to tell you what the price of something is. About half the time someone asks me how much an item costs, there's a price sticker on the item that says how much it is; a further 25% of the time, there's a price on the shelf where they picked it up. The app could probably just look at the UPC and do a database lookup on the store's website, though. The related question "do you have more in stock/where's another store that has more?" could also be answered by a database lookup. The last major customer service function of people on the floor is getting an item down... but robots could do this, trivially if the store were designed to be stocked by robots in the first place (and a stocking robot already existed).
Stocking is a drag for retail. At high-volume stores, it's a difficult job, so turnover is high. Lots of money is wasted on training, and retaining skilled workers is difficult since minimum wage is typical; since worker quality varies so much, and there are usually several who don't show up for work, time taken to stock varies significantly, putting a damper on the effectiveness of JIT warehousing. Stockers at my local Walmart are almost all immigrants who don't speak English, so I don't even bother asking them questions; VPS will make this moot soon, but point is, they don't serve much secondary function and could be safely automated.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
If there are no entry-level jobs, how do we teach people work?
There are entry-level jobs besides retail. For instance, restaurant employment is going up. Also, once the Mexicans have paid for their wall, there will be lots of entry level jobs picking fruit.
Speaking of which I used to LOVE Red Robbin when I lived in Alaska as we did not have much chains up there.
One day in 2010 we saw a closing sign. We asked around and the waiter said no we are just re-opening to a smaller location. I asked a smaller location? Yeah we are doing new innovative techniques with half the staff! Same service but less people so we can do things better according to corporate>?!!
Red Robin sucked afterwards. As it all went from a grill to a freaking chain toaster oven. Instead of a chef who can cook your burger anyway we had no option. Some $ 8/hr employee throws the patty (probably now pre-cooked) into the toaster chain and BOP patties by the dozens in 4 minutes.
I did not see any robots but half of the workers were fired thanks to automation and the quality and choice of foods went down. The clams were now frozen imported into a fryer and peope like assembly lines throw patties into a machine with no option to cook and slopped crap from a bottle and threw it on a plate. Funny prices stayed the same. I thought automation would lower prices so we would have more spending power?
http://saveie6.com/
Retail work is some of the most thankless, soul-flaying work there is.
Airline checkin and Lost&Found beat it hands down.
"As retail sales jobs disappear, stores that sell goods are being replaced with businesses that sell services, such as restaurants, hairdressers, etc"
So in your opinion in 10 years we will cut each others hair to make money?
In self checkout, I end up doing all the work that the cashier used to. Checking out quickly and professionally is a service I'm willing to pay extra for, I don't care about self checkout even if makes the prices a whopping 1% lower.
This is another socialist myth where people will gather an income for doing nothing.
That's not a socialist myth, that's just your misconception of the notion of socialism. Back in the 19th century, nobody conflated socialism with the notion of robotic utopia - there were no robots after all!
Ezekiel 23:20
Yep, all you need to learn is programming in order program robots. Next, knowing how to carve a turkey will teach you enough to be surgeon.
The money they save from other things being cheaper, thanks to automation. Just like automation has done for 400 years, and will keep doing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Personal services will certainly grow, though hopefully more skilled ones. The history of automation is the history of the common man becoming able to afford stuff that previously only the rich could afford. More and more that means services, not just goods.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Don't blame the cashier for that, blame the upper store management. Think wells fargo and what happened with the fake accounts so the peons could keep their job. If you were a cashier, and the boss told it has been commanded, you shall push store credit cards or you shall be fired, would you push or be fired? The big stores have demanded this kind of behavior.
"The money they save from other things being cheaper, thanks to automation. Just like automation has done for 400 years, and will keep doing."
I do think this time is different: first time it was about taking out people from physical work and then humankind discovered (not without a lot of pain for those involved in the meantime) that we could use all those now liberated minds for a profit. But now, the jobs that are taken out are the mental ones. Not, of course, "mental" in the PhD sense, but those that needed the superior mental faculties of a human nevertheless. Once the humankind is not competitive in the physical world (good bye, John Henry) nor in the intellectual world (good bye, Mary Jane, the nice receptionist) what else rests?
But, even given that, I consider it not to be the really important question. It might happen that I'm right, or that I'm wrong and a lot of new jobs appear due to automation and, while billions of people live miserable lives along the transition, in the end humankind as a whole rises to a better level.
I think the important question is that, quite unlike the last 400 years, and in fact, unlike to the whole human history, our species' productivity allows us to ask ourselves for the first time "what's the need to work for a living, after all?"
And, no, I don't think "because that's what we always did" to be a specially profound answer.
"The word "computer" used to universally refer to a person's job title, whereas now it universally refers to a machine [...] you could use that extra time (or money) to take a longer vacation, or have nice things."
So, how many more vacation days have USA people now than in the seventies?
"You can in fact be wealthier with less money; for a real world example of this, look at the techies that live in San Francisco. Most people outside of that area can have a better quality of life on far less income."
How that's possible? Those techies at San Francisco have access to much more "technology"... heck, they are the ones inventing it!
In case you didn't catch what I meant, you were talking about a *possible* outcome, not about that outcome to necessarily become true and, in fact, by your very examples, that your expected outcome will *not* become true.
"What so afraid of the future? Robots will eventually build robots for only raw materials cost"
And what makes you think that the owner of those robots is going to give you one of them?
Heck, even the "owner" of a song will fight nail and teeth against having you a copy of it for free even when the cost of replication is zero!